Boo: Cotton Industry Commercial
Cotton Commerical - Goodbye
The commerical says, “Goodbye Mystery Fabric, Hello Cotton.” Great. That’s not the message I saw when I watched it. I saw people throwing clothing - usable clothing, good clothing - in the garbage. According to this article, over 145 billion pounds of recyclable clothing is sent to landfill each year. So many useful items that could have been donated to a resale/thrift store. Goodwill takes unsaleable textiles and sells them to textile recycling centers.
Annually, textile recycling removes 2.5 billion pounds of consumer clothing waste headed for landfills. This is an average of 10 pounds per American, but it barely puts a dent in the amount that goes to waste. Almost half of the garments reclaimed by textile recyclers are exported to Third World nations to clothe the world’s poorest people.
We’re not even going into traditional cotton (which uses about 25% of the all insecticides). If you want to read stats on cotton - this is a good resource. Anyway - watch the video above - lemme know what you think? I don’t think it’s a very good message…I know that I’m probably being too nitpicky.
Source: North Texan Online
Thanks for the tipoff- this stinks. Someone dropped the ball on this one. People who care about natural fabrics will care about portraying such wastefulness. I’ve added it to my myspace to spread the word.
i am not a fan of mystery fabrics that’s for sure - the cottons stats resource is awesome, thank you
what about wasting marketing dollars on a really frivolous message, you are right this is a wasteful commercial in more ways than one
http://coralrose.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/04/organic-cotton.html
FYI: That 25% is no longer accurate. Coral Rose who was the Sr. Buyer at Wal Mart and started them down the Sustainability path has corrected the stat. It’s still bad stuff, but much lower.
I saw it as an ad on wastefulness as well.